Network Security Evaluation Scheme for WSN in Cyber-physical Systems

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and Internet of Things (IoT) have seen burgeoning growth in every sphere of life. With this growth, researchers now face new challenges in sensor network security. Most of the research in this area only deals with vulnerabilities, attacks and countermeasures. However, considering security of WSN as a comprehensive unit in the practical deployment of CPS is still missing. System engineers need to assess the performance of a WSN against attacks and failures so that they may design reliable and stable networks. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-level Network Security Evaluation Scheme (NSES) to represent different security levels. The main objective of this evaluation scheme is to help system engineers and security experts to be able to assess the security needs of their networks and maintain the required protection level of the network at early design phases. Through several case studies, we have demonstrated the application of this scheme to evaluate and assess the security in different scenarios. These case studies also help in endorsing the usability of the proposed scheme across different application domains.